Everything stood in silence. The voice of the forest was in the silence like the grain in a smooth surface,--perceptible but without harm to it. And such a surface, so fretted by innumerable stirrings, was the silence. Quincy huddled low, head forward, and let the silence enter and pervade him. At last he was drenched with it. And now, it frightened him no longer. He felt free, now, to career in it; since he was part of it, he could go forth beyond it and hear the voice it scabbarded. While his heart had beat against it, he had sat there, strangely afraid and alien to it all. But now, his heart rhythmed to its measure so that he heard it beat no longer. Now, his soul was swathed and soaked to its color, so that he could mount upon the silence and traverse it without sinking, and attain beyond. He and the silence were one. He, then, could know what it knew; feel the purple flame that gave it forth; and sense the slow-moving pulse of which its undulant shadows were a shroud. With his eyes so freed, Quincy looked up, his head no longer stiffly straining forward. * * * * * And then, slowly, like the colors of sunset upon the eastern sky, it came to him. A fibre here, in his soul; a dart there, of fire, and beyond, over a space of grey, a shred of light. Until at last, like the glow of the hid sun below the land, all of him was athrob and painted with it, all of him flamed and sang and quickened to it. There against the stars; there in the deep mazes where other stars lay drowned like pearls in wine; there in that hinted ecstasy of space before which the vibrant lights were hung like a fine girdle before a quivering passion. And below sat Quincy, breathing a calm breath, knowing no cold, no fear, no strangeness--in communion.... His soul loosed within him. Without pain, it broke the bonds of body and went forth. The firm air was an illimitable path, whose boundlessness pointed one way toward that which made it as a candle’s flash, short and ephemeral. All of the world breathed and rolled underneath. All of the world and its firm atmosphere--he saw it swinging eastward, away from the night and toward the long-set sun that it must meet again at dawn. He rested above the rock and above the hill. But beyond him were the stars and the veiled voice, so that he also swung--back, back, back ... to meet the morning. And so poised, in tremulous unison with the earth and the other stars, he rested--while below, vaguely, he was aware of his crouched body and his burning eyes.... * * * * * A tuft of wind fingered his hair. It tumbled against his forehead. The soft bonds of his body clamped close upon his soul. Like a dream on waking, the stars retreated; and as they went, closed in to an infinitude of hopeless depth the subtle Hand that had drawn him forth with its own ecstasied advance.